I worked on this as an undergrad!

Well, not the telescope itself. I worked to run simulations and make charts for the Department of Energy showing how good the specs would need to be on a theoretical future telescope to accomplish the science goal of using the red shift of supernovae to calculate the history of the expansion of the universe.

Funnily enough, I only got that summer research gig because I brought money into the project - from an NSF grant for women and minorities in science. (RIP.)

It's been super cool to see something I worked on a very small piece of actually become real. At the time, it wasn't settled yet that this project would need to be done from a telescope (not a ground observatory), and the sensors that would detect infrared radiation at the level of accuracy needed for the project were still being developed by a partner in industry.
posted by subdee at 10:35 AM on June 13 [8 favorites]

I watched the Netflix doc Cosmic Time Machine (about the Webb) when it came out -- it wasn't bad at all. Looking forward to going through this official history though.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:00 AM on June 13

Through a very unlikely set of circumstances and coincidences, I got to see the Webb telescope before it was launched. It was in a clean room in Pasadena, and I wasn't allowed to take pictures. I saw my reflection in one of the gold mirrors, and I can't really describe the feeling it gave me. It was like being seen by eternity.
posted by vibrotronica at 11:26 AM on June 13 [7 favorites]

I am a member of the JWST NIRCam (the primary imager on the telescope) science team, and so I've been working on the telescope for almost a decade. The first time I saw JWST, it was in pieces, before they put the mirror segments on the backplane, while we were testing the instruments in cryo-vac. I had to travel all over America for tests, making sure the cameras worked, through blizzards, and a hurricane (this is a fun, and lengthy story), and a global pandemic. I remember getting a chance to see it all assembled at a clean room outside of LAX during one of the final instrument tests, and just bursting into tears. Later, after it launched, I was there on console, during the commissioning, when a lot of the early NIRCam images were taken, and it was really magic to see this thing working, like, really working, really bringing us these images. The rarely seen first light image from JWST, before it was aligned and focused, is a kind of snowy mess, as the telescope was pointing at the relatively nearby LMC, thousands of stars all fuzzy and blurry and multiply imaged. But when the telescope was aligned, when those first images came down, and when we were able to see some of the truly deepest galaxies humans have ever seen, I'll remember those emotions for the rest of my life.

We live in a kind of nightmare of selfishness and fear and cruelty and hate, but it's pretty incredible that we privilege learning about ourselves so much that we built this incredibly expensive, risky, complicated science project and put it on a rocket that could blow up and sent it off to teach us about how beautiful existing is. With JWST we can see exactly how complexity was created, atom by atom, through the fusion in the cores of stars and the light from gas falling on black holes and galaxies colliding and planets cooling and asteroids crashing, and here we are, almost fourteen billion years later, just alive and beautiful and precious and precious and precious.

It's fun to see some of the folks who were in the trenches with me throughout this process in the documentary. (I have a larger issue which is that it largely didn't interview a number of the really, really important folks involved with the telescope in favor of a kind of large group of NASA folks that are always trotted out for these things, but that's just how it goes).
posted by RubixsQube at 11:38 AM on June 13 [28 favorites]

just alive and beautiful and precious and precious and precious

i love this
posted by neuromodulator at 9:37 PM on June 13

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